891.711/7
The Chargé in Iran (Merriam) to the Secretary of State
[Received June 10.]
Sir: I have the honor to refer to my despatch No. 766 of April 15, 1936 on the above subject, and to report that second-class mail matter of American origin still remains undelivered.
On the occasion of an interview which I had with the Under Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on May 6th I brought up this matter by inquiring when subscribers to American publications could expect to receive them, pointing out that many technical papers could not under any stretch of the imagination be thought to contain anything relating to Iran. I also told him of the large number of protests I had received.
The Under Secretary replied that he also had heard a large number of complaints on the subject, and promised “to do something about it.”
When the Interpreter of the Legation saw the Under Secretary again on May 9th, he had in mind the thoroughly offensive articles on the Iranian withdrawal which appeared in the issue of Time dated April 13th, and several other articles containing unfortunate references to the Shah and to Iran which had recently come to the Legation’s attention. He therefore asked the Under Secretary whether the latter had [Page 378] recently seen any objectionable clippings from the American press. Mr. Soheily replied that he had not, and that those which he had seen were very much along the lines of what had appeared in the press of Teheran.
On May 3d, Mr. Gharib, Chief of the Press Bureau at the Foreign Office, had asked me to send him all the clippings I could from the American press on the subject of the Iranian withdrawal. At the same time he said he felt very friendly to Americans, regretted what had taken place, and so forth and so on. The following day I sent him two perfectly unexceptionable clippings, as I saw no reason why the Legation should cut off its own nose by sending him everything it had indiscriminately.
Yesterday I saw Mr. Gharib again at the Iran Club and asked him whether he had seen any large number of recent clippings. He said that he had, and that a number of them had “une très mauvaise tournure”, from which I gather that the Foreign Office now knows the worst and is deciding what to do about it. It would not surprise me in the slightest if, sometime within the next two weeks, the Legation were packed off, with or without baggage, a possibility that was forecast in my telegram No. 27 of March 30, 7 p.m.17 On the other hand, we have had so much consistent bad luck that it seems impossible that it can hold.
As a further indication of the way the wind blows I may add that Mr. Myron Bement Smith, American architect-archaeologist at Isfahan, has been privately advised by M. Godard, the Frenchman in charge of the Iranian antiquities department, to be extremely careful in everything that he does.
Under the circumstances, any insistence that American newspapers and magazines should be allowed to come through would seem out of place for the present.
Respectfully yours,